Research Downloads

WCF releases out survey of over 500 local businesses and the climate of the regional workforce in Central Florida.  Participating employers uniformly identified the Central Florida region as a great growth market for businesses, with access to both a large customer base and labor pool.  Three in five employers across the region expect to add positions to their companies during the next twelve months.  Employers are most challenged by a severe shortage of available skilled workers and are consequently increasing workload for current staff.  Employers view increasing training initiatives as a possible solution to their labor shortage.  Learn more in the report.

When it comes to the issue of growth, what is it about their current quality of life that the citizens of Central Florida value the most? Harris Interactive, an internationally recognized strategic research organization, conducted a study for myregion.org that identified the shared, core values Central Floridians associate with quality of life, growth, and the development of their ideal community. The study explored attitudinal diff e rences among key stakeholder groups such as citizens, business leaders, and local political and regulatory personnel.

Social Capital is a way of conceptualizing and measuring how connected people are to one another.  Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: Collapse and Revival of the American Community argues that civic and social ties in American society have weakened over the past several generations. The Central Florida Social Capital Survey, a computer-assisted telephone survey of more than 1,600 residents of the region, was conducted by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Sciences. The extensive survey concludes that while Central Florida is in many ways a microcosm of the nation, both demographically and in terms of stores of social capital, raising the level of social capital in the region would help promote a wide variety of positive social, political and community outcomes.

This national survey finds that nearly 7 in 10 American workers plan to continue to work full or part time for pay following retirement from their main job. Another 14% plan to work as volunteers, while only 13% expect to stop working entirely. The survey of 800 American workers also finds that older workers believe they are treated unfairly by employers, and also raises workers’ concerns about the financial soundness of Social Security and Medicare.

Conducted by The Center on Aging & Work at Boston College, this study answers the questions: (1) To what extent employers identify the aging of the workforce as an important business issue; (2) Why some employers respond to the needs and preferences of older workers and others do not; and (3) What types of workplaces adopt and implement different flexible work options for older workers. 

The Regional Indicators Report establishes a key indicator system that not only measures progress in the myregion.org priority areas, but indicates the region’s success in becoming less fragmented and more coordinated. The report also seeks to quantify the Central Florida region’s progress toward or away from “sustainability.”

Success by Ten is a proposed program designed to help every child achieve success in school by age ten. It calls for a major expansion and intensification of Head Start and Early Head Start, so that every disadvantaged child has the opportunity to enroll in a high-quality program of education and care during the first five years of his or her life.

At some point during their first five years, nearly one-quarter of all children spend about 30 hours per week in family child care (FCC). While there is no universally recognized definition, FCC is typically characterized as nonparental, paid care for nonrelative children that generally takes place in the provider’s home and is regulated by the state. This research reveals:  (1) Families using home-based care (both regulated and unregulated) are more likely to prefer this care for infants and toddlers, but prefer preschools and centers for older children; (2) Family child care providers tend to cite enjoyment of working with children and earning extra income while staying at home with their own children as their motivation for providing care and: (3) Most observational studies to date suggest that much of family child care is of “adequate” quality, although researchers are still grappling with the best way to measure quality in home-based settings.

This policy brief highlights research results from a comprehensive portrait of working families living in poverty, both national and in the rural south.  This brief explores (1) characteristics of the working poor families and how they have changed over time; (2) roles public assistance plays in coping strategies for working poor families and; (3) how public assistance program can be better tailored to address the needs of working poor families.  

Nationally for every dollar a working family saves of housing it spends 77 cents more on transportation.  Among other observations, this study presents, the combined housing and transportation cost burdens of working families on 28 in metropolitan areas at the neighborhood level.

The EITC, and increasingly the ACTC, played an important role over the first half of this decade in supplementing the wages earned by low-income working families—particularly in regions hardest hit by the economic downturn and subsequent slow recovery. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners should give further attention to the implications of the nation's growing suburban population of EITC earners, to the important overlaps that exist between filers who benefit from the EITC and the ACTC, and to bolstering the growing yet still-limited reach of volunteer tax preparation programs.

Congress reauthorized Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the nation's primary cash assistance program for families with children, in February 2006 as part of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Under reauthorization, Congress increased the share of the caseload that states must include when calculating work participation rates, and it restructured the caseload credit that states receive. These changes will require most states to greatly increase work participation among their caseloads in order to avoid financial penalties¹ and could cause many states to rethink their current welfare policies overall. This marks a good time to review states' current rules. Such a review can provide a benchmark against which future changes can be assessed.

A review of spending decisions nationwide and in three states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—under the Temporary Assistance program since its enactment in 1996 finds that:  (1)  Nationwide, states have evolved from spending most Temporary Assistance funding on cash assistance to spending more on benefits and services to a large number of families who do not receive cash assistance; (2) Overall spending levels on Temporary Assistance in the three states have diverged in recent years and; (3) As in the rest of the nation, each of the three states provides Temporary Assistance-funded benefits to a substantial number of low-wage workers who do not receive cash assistance.

Research suggests that having a car is a worthwhile investment in better outcomes for low-income families. Recent reports quantify the additional money required to own and operate personal vehicles, as compared to the lower cost of traveling on public transit. However, this method of accounting fails to consider the fact that poor workers without a car may not be able to search for or accept a better-paying job because public transit doesn't take them there, causing these workers to lose income or benefits as a result. This report outlines opportunity costs experienced by transit-dependent poor households, and concludes that when all costs are considered along with benefits of private vehicles, it makes sense to press for more assistance and policies that reduce car ownership costs for poor workers.

Capital access programs and funds for women starting and expanding their businesses have grown dramatically over the past decade. These programs cover the spectrum from microenterprise to venture capital funds and serve highly diverse populations. Thirteen "best practice" programs and three "promising practices" (new programs that appear innovative but do not yet have a track record) are profiled in this report and are the basis for our analysis of key success factors, barriers, and constraints faced by women entrepreneurs, and our policy recommendations. We profile and analyze the programs to share best practices and lessons learned so that successful programs can be replicated. Our analysis of these best practice programs identifies six areas that can improve the strength of all capital access programs and expand their reach.

This brief focuses on the data side of career advancements by identifying issues, challenges, and methods for setting advancement targets, and collecting and reporting data associated with those targets.

The National Study of Child Care for Low Income Families is a five-year research effort that will provide policy makers with information on the effects of Federal, state and local policies and programs on child care at the community level, and the employment and child care decisions of low-income families.

After nearly a decade of decline, the number of children living in low-income families has been steadily increasing, a pattern that began in 2000. This data book provides national and 50-state trend data on the characteristics of low-income children over the past decade: parental education, parental employment, marital status, family structure, race and ethnicity, age distribution, parental nativity, home ownership, residential mobility, type of residential area, and region of residence.